Redeeming Totality

When modernism was initially celebrated and canonized as "international," artists and critics had mostly Europe in mind. Although the world was embroiled in a series of imperial wars and colonial ventures, modernism came to be associated with the great capitals of Europe—Paris and London, principally. And even though the celebrated cosmopolitanism of these cities included both postcolonial subjects and foreign-service veterans, the literature that emerged from them was written and critically canonized in terms of the traditions of the West.

Somewhat surprisingly, recent criticism of modernism tends to reinforce this bias. Although the so-called new modernist studies represent a timely shift away from the traditional attention to formal experimentation toward a more sociological appreciation of modernism's institutional and cultural functions, critics still tend to restrict themselves to the standard Euro-American focus.¹ Nicholas Brown's Utopian Generations: The Political Horizon of Twentieth-Century Literature is thus welcome on two fronts: it places modernism firmly in the global context of European colonialism, and it analyzes this contextual relation with a Marxist methodology that allows us to understand dialectically the historical relationship between the literatures of the metropole and the periphery, which has almost always been formulated in reductively evaluative terms. Brown's agenda is correspondingly twofold: he works to establish postcolonial African literature as an extension of the European modernist project, and he attempts to prove that only a Jamesonian method will enable us to understand this historical relation in its full political implications.²

Central to this agenda is the much-maligned category of totality. Brown affirms that one of his central theoretical objectives is "to restore the respectability of this Hegelian concept—indeed of the dialectic itself—to postcolonial studies" (7). He engages head-on the familiar criticism of totality as methodologically reductive or politically reactionary, affirming that "only when capitalism is explicitly named as a totality can it itself be historicized" (11). This return to Hegelian totality enables Brown not only to link European modernism to postcolonial African literature in terms of the structural expansion of capitalism, but also to clarify the nature of the utopian impulse which they both share. For Brown, utopia is "nothing other than a lack or contradiction in the actually existing social totality whose presence hints at an as yet unimaginable future" (22). This future is the horizon to which Brown's title refers.

Brown's commitment to utopia places him firmly under the Jamesonian banner, and the "generations" in his title could as easily refer to his own commitment to perpetuating a Marxist project which always seems on the verge of being swallowed up by the more politically modest techno-bureaucratic methods of most contemporary literary and cultural studies. Thus unlike most of us, for whom Marx is simply one big name among others in a motley grab bag of convenient theoretical citations (and for whom Hegel is generally a dim graduate school memory), Brown explicitly structures his entire study dialectically, as a series of textual pairings which, "with increasing intensity" (33), approach the ultimate political horizon of literature indicated in his title. Each pairing consists of two chapters that explore the formal and thematic correspondences between a European modernist and an African postcolonial author in terms of a larger category of analysis. Thus James Joyce and Cheikh Hamidou Kane are brought together under the rubric of "subjectivity"; Ford Madox Ford and Chinua Achebe meet within the category of "history"; and, finally, Wyndham Lewis and Ngugi wa Thiong'o bring us into the ultimate horizon of "politics."

Although Brown's method of linking modernist and postcolonial literatures is unapologetically Hegelian, the central concept whereby he forges this link is Kantian. For it is the sublime, which Brown glosses as "the simultaneous experience of aesthetic unboundedness and conceptual totalization" (17), that straddles the geopolitical divide repeatedly schematized by the structure of this ambitious study. Thus in his opening chapter on Ulysses, the canonical European modernist masterpiece par excellence, Brown focuses only on the...